How to Sell

by Clancy Martin

  “Send that girl of yours, that Polish girl, in here while you’re gone.” Joe could never understand that the Polack was her name, not her ethnic origin. She wasn’t Polish. I always thought of her as Kazakh. Something basically Russian, but more exotic.

  “You got any more pickled eggs in back, Bobby?”

  I kept pickled eggs in the fridge for Joe because he had once mentioned that no bars in the state of Texas kept pickled eggs on the counter any longer. I sent the Polack out to find a gallon jar of pickled eggs the same day. Turns out they are more available than you think.

  “Send her in with a couple of eggs on a plate, would you, Bobby?”

  When Ronnie went to prison, the store closed its doors, and we all went our separate ways, at first the Polack went out on her own, hip-pocketing. Mostly Swiss watches, turn-of-the-century large finished pieces, some counterfeit cut color, and loose diamonds. Jim offered her a job with us when she gunned down this young kid, a customer of mine, outside my office.

  The customer was a heavyset redheaded guy from Mexico City. He wore glasses and looked more like a poet than a diamond thief. He was selling me a cheap four-carat diamond. It was stolen, brown, and full of carbon, and I planned to offer him a hundred a carat. Five bills tops. It would flip to Moshe or Western Trading for twenty-five hundred, maybe three grand. But before I made an offer I needed to show him a few diamonds of mine so that he would understand how bad his diamond was.

  I had prepared several stones with fake cheap prices printed boldly on the diamond papers so that he would believe you could buy pretty four-carats for a thousand or less. I had bought from him before and I knew he was stupid and in a hurry, so I knew it would be easy. But in the middle of my explanation he jumped up, yelled some word that I didn’t catch, and pulled a pistol on me. We had been robbed before, and the way he was bouncing on his legs I could see that he might shoot me accidentally. So I gave him the whole diamond box. I was already thinking of the numbers I had to call: first Paul, our insurance agent, then Jim at his girlfriend’s, then the police, next Granddad (they were mostly his diamonds), then Amos at HDC about his memo stones, and Ken over at the bank, then Wendy. But as the Mexican ran out of my office the Polack was there and she took him by the shoulder and shot him briskly twice in the stomach. From my office it looked like she was holding him up to shoot him. But she fired so quickly you couldn’t say. Then she stepped back and he fell. I looked for blood on her white dress. But she was as clean as a flame. She ignored the collapsed man, picked up the diamond box from the floor, and returned it to me. The poor kid was squirming on the floor. But he was oddly silent, like he was trying to catch his breath.

  “Ha!” she said. “The young!” She was not thirty years old herself at the time. She sat down at my desk and opened her briefcase.

  “Now you owe me, Clark! Ha ha! You better call the cops! The ambulances!”

  “Hi, Polack,” I said. My hands wobbled. I took off my wedding ring and put it on my diamond scale. I had never seen a real live human being shot before.

  “Just a second, Polack,” I said. “Hi. I asked could you give me one second.”

  That was the day I fell in love with her. I asked her out to dinner.

  Jim later remarked that it didn’t matter if she was my girlfriend for the next ten years, I would always only be a customer to the Polack.

  Even after she came to work for us she continued her side deals. “I have money to make,” she told us, as though that were the end of the discussion. At times it was convenient. If we were short on cash ourselves. Our sales manager, Lou Sosa, sold her his Blancpain for fifteen hundred bucks. That was a thousand shy of what it should have been. The Polack paid less than everyone else but she always paid cash. Sosa needed the money to square up with his divorce attorney. It was a dirty divorce with a child and the worthless remains of Sosa’s old lawn-mowing business he kept on the side.

  He asked me, “How can I turn this watch into cash in a hurry?” It was a beautiful automatic chronograph with a stainless head and a hobnail bezel. I had bought it off the street and given it to him as a bonus or a consolation when we first moved him from the shop onto the sales floor.

  “I really hate to let it go, boss,” he said. Sosa had these sloppy, worn-out shoulders that made you feel sorry for him. He always used a kind of pity-close on his customers. Told them his hard-luck stories. His lips were thin and his ears were white and small. “It represents my success to me. But I got to have the money. I mean, unless you guys can float me a loan? Like five grand?”

  “I’d buy it if I could. You might ask the Watchman,” I told him. “But if you’re in a hurry, sell it to the Polack.”

  “I don’t like that woman,” he said. “No offense,” he added quickly. Officially nobody knew the Polack and I were involved but it was one of those open secrets. You couldn’t hide anything around our store for long. We worked too many hours.

  “No big deal,” I said. “I don’t always like her myself.”

  “Frankly I wish Jim had never hired the Anteater,” he went on.

  That’s a bit much, Sosa, I thought. But I knew he was angry at all women, then, because of the divorce, so I let it slide. I changed the subject.

  Over the years she had acquired many of these unattractive industry names. One of them was the Anteater, because people said she had a practice, when inspecting diamond packages, of licking out the melee while your eye was turned and storing it in her cheeks like a goddamn hamster.

  “Wouldn’t that get her killed?’ I asked Jim once, skeptically. “I mean, if it’s true that she does that. Or thrown in jail or something.”

  “I don’t think anyone has actually ever caught her at it, Bobby,” Jim said. “Plus she does a lot of business with those fellas. It’s like her commission, I guess. They’re all too busy staring at her legs to notice anyway.”

  When Granddad heard we were putting her to work at our place he called me and told me not to do business with the Gypsy.

  “I’ve known her since I was a kid, Granddad,” I reassured him. “She helped me sell my first Rolex.” That was not true but she had helped me sell plenty of them. She was the most dexterous liar I had ever met.

  “She’s Russian mob, Grandson,” Granddad said. “We don’t want those guys in your store.”

  He was a silent investor and he knew how to play by those elegant rules. But I could hear in his voice that he wanted to tell me I wasn’t allowed to hire her at all.

  She liked to wear oversized gold hoop earrings. You might have thought that was why some people called her the Gypsy. But they called her the Gypsy because of a different story that no one liked to talk about. It wasn’t because she was a Gypsy, but because of something she was supposed to have done to some Gypsies.

  I left Joe in my office and found her in back, at her desk, browsing through jewelry catalogues. She was wearing a bright green dress and her pale, snow-colored legs were bare. She was loveliest when she was concentrating on something, like she was at the moment. I stopped to look at her, for a moment, before she knew I was watching her. You couldn’t help yourself. She makes Kate Moss look like a dog’s belly, I thought.

  She turned the pages in the catalogue. She would often tear out a page, look at it carefully, and then crumple it and throw it away. Like all independent custom jewelers, we ordered catalogues from every jewelry store and manufacturer in the world to get ideas for designs and to anticipate new trends. It didn’t work particularly well, but looking for designs was a job our people enjoyed.

  She started to show me a new Cartier design that she wanted to knock off, but I interrupted her and said, “Could you go sit with Morgan? Could you entertain him for a minute?”

  I had the bracelet in my hand. I held it out to her to explain.

  “Ha! Good. That old cowboy. He is horny,” she said.

  I did not know how to respond to that remark.

  “Bring him a couple of those eggs on a plate, would you?”

>   “No, I won’t. Those eggs disgust me. An Oriental person would eat them.”

  “Polack, come on. Would you help me out, please? As a favor?”

  I took the emerald bracelet to Old John. I pulled him back to the polishing room, where we could speak discreetly.

  Old John was a former helicopter gunner who held the first bench in our jewelry store. At Popper’s Old John had always worked in the basement—“like the Roman god Vulcan,” Old John used to say—but in our store he sat right up front. All of our jewelers worked in the front-of-the-house. Jim said the customers would worry about their jewelry less, while it was being worked on, if they could keep an eye on it. The best jeweler sat up front. From up front you could watch the teenage girls go in and out of Victoria’s Secret through the big bay window next to the double doors. Tommy, our second-best bench man, sat behind Old John, and behind Tommy was Larry, et cetera, down to the back of the store, where the polishing wheels were. The exception was our wax carver, who always held the last bench because he claimed you couldn’t carve waxes with people watching.

  Although Old John used solder to fill the gaps in his channel setting he was a patient jeweler, and was the only one who could reliably work with platinum without costing us money. He never broke diamonds, not even the corners on princess cuts. He worked late like Jim and me. But we came in early and we never asked Old John to come in before noon. Often, after the store was closed and everyone else had gone home, he would tell me about his time as a gunner in Vietnam, or his year in prison in Mexico, or the seven years he did at Leavenworth, in Kansas, where he learned to be a jeweler. It’s a fact many people don’t know, that most jewelers and watchmakers learn how to sit on the bench while in prison.

  Old John dyed his hair jet-black. He kept a jade-handled .45 chained to his bench. At Christmas he brought his boa in for the late nights and fed it mice in the store. He was five-foot-three. He drove a small, light, bruised Ford truck. His cheeks were as yellow and shiny as a tortoise’s bottom shell. His lunch and his dinner came to work with him in Tupperware, and he brought his own special coffee in a canteen. He did not drink or smoke, and unlike almost every other jeweler I have ever known, he didn’t take speed or other stimulants. I admired his asceticism.

  “Old John, I have a problem,” I said. “We need this bracelet to be platinum.”

  He inspected it dubiously.

  “I don’t feel very good about pulling those emeralds,” Old John said.

  “Me neither,” I said. “Plus we don’t have the time to remake the whole thing. So, let’s do it the old-fashioned way.”

  “Change the stamp,” Old John said.

  “I think it’s for the best,” I said. “He’s not buying today, but we may as well do it right now. In case he wants to loupe the emeralds. I don’t want him to notice the numbers. Be careful when you’re polishing it. Then bring it back over to me on the other side.”

  “Is this a smart idea?” he said. “Does Jim know about this?”

  “Old John, it’s important,” I said. “We’re not going to make a habit of it.”

  What Old John was doing for me was grinding out the “18kw,” or eighteen-karat white gold stamps, on the bracelet—there were two, one on the tongue of the box clasp and one on the undercarriage—and restamping the bracelet “Pt,” or platinum. He would rhodium-plate the whole afterward to give it that false brightness of freshly polished platinum. This was a common trick in the industry—restamping one karat weight or kind of metal as another—which I tried to avoid because it was amateurish, and easily discovered if the piece in question was ever inspected by another appraiser. Nevertheless, on certain occasions it was handy.

  Back in my office the Polack and Morgan were laughing together. My favorite thing about the Polack was when I made her laugh. She looked much happier than most people. And, especially, happier than Wendy. But I wasn’t crazy about it when other men got her laughing.

  Morgan took the bottle and poured himself another bourbon. I always left the bottle on the desk, but not too close to him, so that he would never think I was encouraging him to drink. In reach, with a stretch.

  “What do you think, girl?” He grabbed her knee with his hand. Then he winked at me and let go. “You taken a look at that old emerald bracelet? Your boss here is trying to rope me into another one of his hundred-thousand-dollar jewelry deals. What do you think, ole Polack? You think that bracelet would make a nice Christmas present for my wife?”

  “This bracelet is for a woman of her kind. Your wife is the type of beautiful woman, Mr. Joe Morgan. So, yes, the bracelet.”

  Yes, the bracelet. I liked that. Good close, Polack, I thought.

  “Mr. Morgan? Did you call me Mr. Morgan, girl? Mr. Morgan was my father! How many times do I have to tell you to call me Joe?”

  “That’s not a Christmas present, Joe,” I said. We were half a year away from Christmas. I didn’t have that kind of time. “Your anniversary is barely a month away. That’s an anniversary piece. We’ll figure something else out for Christmas. For anniversaries you want something that will stay in the family. Something your wife can pass down to your daughter. That bracelet is a Morgan family heirloom. At that price, especially. Here, Joe, let me see that pinkie ring of yours. When was the last time I cleaned that for you? Polack, would you mind taking this little diamond of Joe’s next door and have Christian give it a tighten and polish?”

  Joe Morgan wore a five-carat princess cut in a rose gold pinkie ring I had sold him a couple of years before. The stone was what is called top-light-brown, a kind of orangey-tan color, but set in rose gold with a rhodium plating beneath I had managed to make it look almost white. Cheap big diamonds like that are perfect for men’s rings, because men feel it is feminine to inquire too closely about the quality of a diamond once it is set in a piece of men’s jewelry. They are very particular about their wives’ diamonds. But they are insecure about wearing diamond jewelry themselves, and they suppose that if they ask too many questions about their own diamonds you will conclude they are gay.

  “Where the hell is she going? Where are you going, girl? Well if you got to go, go. But hurry back.” He reached to pat the Polack on the bottom as she left, but she swung her hips and he missed.

  “Man, that’s a fine piece of ass, Bobby,” he said. “You ever get yourself any of that action? Just a taste, maybe?”

  We smiled that man’s smile at each other, but I did not say anything.

  “I wanted us to have a chance to speak seriously about this bracelet, Joe. You know I always tell people that you buy jewelry for the pleasure of owning it, not as an investment. But that piece is something entirely different. That truly is investment quality. It’s like buying a Picasso. You don’t see emeralds like that anymore, not even loose. But a hundred-year-old platinum bracelet that was formerly owned by an Argentinean countess? Come on. Plus the circumstances. If we sent that bracelet to Sotheby’s or Christie’s it would bring four hundred grand. She knows it, too. But she doesn’t have the time. And the whole thing has to be cash. It has to be done with the greatest discretion. Margaret can’t even wear that bracelet around town for a year or two. I’m dead serious about that. It will be recognized. That’s one of the reasons I called you on this one, Joe. I know I can count on your discretion.”

  “Hell, there ain’t nothing to worry about there. You know I can keep a damn secret. Code de macho. I sure as hell know you can, too.” He laughed. Morgan liked to tell me stories about his wild days in the border towns. They were good stories.

  “You in any hurry today, Bobby? Hell, I got some time today. Let’s you and me relax a little bit, what do you say? Hit me again with that bourbon, would you?”

  I poured him a cautious finger or two. I wanted him to want more than I was offering him.

  “Keep going, keep going, there you go. That’ll do her.”

  Well, well, I thought. This might be even easier than I thought. We might even wrap this one up today.

&
nbsp; When I got home that night, still warm from the sale to Morgan, Wendy announced that she was going to fly down to St. Croix to seek my father’s assistance for us.

  “Maybe he can help. You always listen to your dad. We should both go.”

  “Wendy, you know how busy we are. If you are so determined, you can go, I guess. But you know I can’t get away. Not to mention that you are crazy to think my dad will be any good. Jim’s right. He’s insane, Wendy.”

  “Crazy or not, I believe in your dad,” she said.

  “What about the baby?” I said. “What about Claire?” I was frightened to be left alone with that little baby of ours.

  “I knew you would say that,” she said. She looked so tired and even disappointed that I wished I had kept my mouth shut. But, really. “I already asked my mother to come watch her, Bobby.”

  “I have to work, Wendy. That’s all I was saying. Somebody has to pay our bills.”

  “Anyway I already bought the ticket.”

  “Maybe it will be like a vacation,” I said. “You could use a vacation. Get a little sun. We could both use a vacation.” I had not meant to say that. I did not want her to think there was any possibility I could go or even consider going.

  “It is not a vacation, Bobby. For crying out loud. Can you even hear yourself? Do you listen to what you say? I swear, what is wrong with you sometimes?”

  Why don’t you go ahead and tell me? I thought. What’s wrong with me: if I am quiet for a few minutes you will be happy to instruct me.

  “I am going to save this family,” she said.

  For the past few years our dad had been bouncing around even more than usual. When his last church had failed, in Coral Gables, he had been certified as a minister and a missionary for the Unitarian Church of Palm Beach and Boca Raton. The U.S. Virgin Islands was his first assignment.

  “It’s paradise, son,” he told me on the phone. “Grab your big brother and hop on a plane. Bring your scuba gear. You boys will love it.”